tech

2024-07-18 · open the original ↗

• DevRel works only as a trusted source, not as marketing. Jones, VP of developer relations at TBD at Block, says developers are allergic to traditional marketing, and she has recommended competing tools when they were the best fit; Hanselman frames this with his radio-ad line "you've got a friend in the diamond business."
• She won't promote products she doesn't believe in. Both acknowledge this comes from a position of privilege; she argues internally against weak products, and tells employers that pushing one would cost trust and make her less effective afterwards.
• Bringing community feedback back inside is core work. She says the job is working with the community, not talking at it, and reporting pain points back to engineering and marketing; she argues that sharing this is what earns respect for teams whose travel can look like a party.
• Developer-tools advocates should have been developers first. For SDK and API work she says you need to know developers' real constraints (her example is teams stuck on Java 8 or 11 because upgrading a bank system needs buy-in); she frames it as "the easier path," not a gate, and has juniors on her team but would never hire one as a sole advocate without senior mentors.
• Advocates should specialise rather than do everything. She and Hanselman agree that building on each person's strengths beats demanding a Swiss-army-knife of video, samples, docs and social; she negotiated her first title from "developer evangelist" to "developer advocate" because evangelism implies forcing a belief.

2024-07-16 · open the original ↗

• Cloudflare's speed test gives a fuller picture than a headline number. The host says speed.cloudflare.com starts automatically and measures bandwidth in segments of 100 KB, 1 MB, 10 MB, 25 MB, 100 MB and 250 MB files, aggregated into the total. It also measures latency unloaded and during upload and download, graphs packet loss, and maps your location against the test server.

2024-07-16 · open the original ↗

• Developers build for power users, but most users are novices. Schuster, of the South Carolina UX consultancy True Matter, says most user errors are about getting into apps at all. Novices struggle to tell whether they are logged in, two-factor authentication makes them angry, and even corporate power users on single sign-on report more than typical frustration. He says developers tend to think "login, I've got a module for this, done".
• Good UX answers basic questions so users never stop to think. Users need to know where they are, what they can do, what the rules are for an input, and what went wrong and what to do about it, in plain language. A field label like "ID" is not clear to most people. One pause is small, Schuster says, but five to ten of them become friction that frustrates.
• Watching real users fail is what changes a team's mind. Schuster runs task-based tests with developers watching behind one-way glass. He says they move through the Kübler-Ross stages, starting with "this person's dumb". By about the third user with the same problem the team accepts it is a design problem, and after that the fixes need no argument and are often small. He also says teams that claim to know their users are often off base, building what they or their stakeholders want.
• If you can't get access to users, find them anyway. He calls an organization that insulates its team from users "basically guessing", and says a customer wish list almost never equals what users want or need. His advice is to observe users without asking permission, perhaps on a learning-and-growth budget, as his own firm did in its early days. Otherwise, find an organization that lets you.
• Speed is the shared ground between UX and developers. Schuster says slowness has been users' number one complaint for his whole career, so his researchers look for the number two complaint. He recommends Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things as the first book on UX. He urges developers to learn a little UX, and people on the humanities side to learn a little development, so both can "talk at the same table".

2024-07-12 · open the original ↗

• The UniFi Cable Internet modem replaces an ISP modem inside UniFi. The UCI costs $279 and has one DOCSIS 3.1 coax port and one 2.5 GbE port. A full 2.5 Gbps link needs one of the five UniFi gateways with a 2.5 GbE WAN port. It works behind a non-UniFi gateway, but then you get no statistics, and even in UniFi it shows only CPU, memory and bandwidth.
• ISP compatibility is narrow, so research before buying. It is US-only: Comcast Business only on the business side, Xfinity, Charter Spectrum or Cox on the residential side. Comcast caps third-party modems at 1.2 Gbps down and 40 Mbps up, Spectrum at 1 Gbps and 35 Mbps. It does not work on high-split DOCSIS, and some ISPs are rolling out DOCSIS 4.
• Static IPs on Comcast Business rule it out. Comcast Business allows static IPs only through its own gateway, so the host, who has a block of five static IPs, cannot use his unit. He is giving it away to a US subscriber.
• The main reason to buy is lease savings. The host pays Comcast Business a $32.95 monthly equipment fee, so a UCI would pay for itself in about 8.5 months and save over $300 a year after that. Activation is mostly reported online as under 10 minutes without calling support, with some calls running past an hour and one case unresolved even after a truck roll.
• Users report better performance more often than not. From Reddit and forum posts, the host found about 75% of users reporting faster speeds than with their ISP modem. Of the rest, half saw no change and half saw worse performance. He stresses this is anecdotal and reads it as a better-than-even chance of improvement.

2024-07-12 · open the original ↗

• Model data around your queries, and choose the partition key early. Cocchi, a PM on Microsoft's Azure Cosmos DB team working on the .NET and Go SDKs for the NoSQL API, says to denormalize, for example by embedding a person's addresses in the person document. Cosmos scales horizontally by adding machines, and the partition key must be chosen when a container is created. The logical partition is the property value, such as a city, which is hashed to a physical partition, the machine that stores it. A good key reduces cross-partition queries but cannot eliminate them.
• Size throughput in request units before you build. A point read, one item fetched by ID and partition key, costs about one RU for a 1 KB document. Cocchi points to the capacity calculator, which takes document size and requests per second, and warns that under-provisioning shows up as 429 throttling errors.
• Direct mode is fastest, but gateway mode limits open connections. In direct mode the .NET and Java SDKs connect straight to the backend nodes, opening four connections per physical partition, one per replica. With hundreds or, for some customers, thousands of partitions, that adds up, so the gateway's extra hop can be worth it. She says the client is heavy, carrying routing, caches and service logic, so create it as a singleton: one client per account for the application's lifetime.
• Consistency choices trade freshness against latency, especially across regions. Cosmos offers five modes. Strong consistency commits every write to all replicas, in every region, before acknowledging it. Cocchi recalls a limit of "like 5,000 miles or something" for strong consistency with multiple write regions. Bounded staleness lets reads lag by K versions or T time, and throttles writes if the lag exceeds those bounds. Session consistency lets a user read their own writes. She recommends at least two regions for any production app, and says the point-read SLA is under 10 ms.
• Use diagnostics and OpenTelemetry, and write your own retry policy. Every SDK request returns a diagnostic string listing retries, the regions contacted and the handler pipeline; support will ask for it when the P99 is affected. The .NET and Java SDKs now emit OpenTelemetry traces, with latency thresholds that capture diagnostics automatically and send them to tools such as Application Insights. The SDK retries 429s only a limited number of times, so she says the application should still handle cases such as 408 timeouts from a faulty pod or high client CPU. She was due to cover these topics at VSLive Redmond in August.

2024-07-11 · open the original ↗

• Feed algorithms reward frequency, which makes quality stand out. Rose, who blogs at samwho.dev, says curation algorithms reward daily posting and LLMs make low-quality volume easier to produce; he posts rarely and avoids naming specific technologies (load-balancing algorithms, not a particular implementation) so posts age well.
• Raw web standards are his bet on longevity. He uses web components without helper libraries and no framework, with TypeScript the only dependency he worries about over 10–20 years; PixiJS (about 600 KB, of which he uses a sliver) may give way to his own 2D renderer, which he says can recreate simpler visualizations in under 10 KB.
• Readers don't realise the visualizations are clickable. He takes at least half the blame: through several rounds of watching friends scroll past, a yellow button and then a static cursor both failed, and only an animated cursor labelled "click" worked, teaching him that people skim rather than read top to bottom.
• His posts are simulations, not drawn animations. Each widget is a configurable web component over domain-modelled classes (load balancers, servers, requests); randomness in the load-balancing post cost him evenings waiting for the right behaviour, so the queuing post he was paid to write for Encore's blog uses uniform timings, a realism trade-off he dislikes.
• The web should move beyond text for teaching. He calls himself a visual learner despite the research Hanselman cites against learning styles, says video has never worked for him, and, echoing Andy Matuschak, argues interactive media could make educational material 10x better than text.

2024-07-09 · open the original ↗

• Outsourced identity is now the norm, so integration is the hard part. Sempf, an application security architect, says he long told developers not to build their own identity system: code against corporate AD or use Google or Facebook OAuth so they never store passwords. He says providers such as Okta, Ping and Microsoft Entra now do this at scale. The risk has moved to integration, such as moving a 2004 Spring MVC app with its own password store onto Ping. Vendors' sample code also takes shortcuts, like repeatedly sending basic-auth credentials in a header, which he says is unsafe even over TLS.
• Misconfigured cloud systems are a frequent finding in his assessments. The open S3 bucket protected only by an unguessable URL is his classic example. Sempf says the expert who knew how to tune the on-premises servers, Cisco gear and WAF no longer applies once everything moves to Azure. Configuration has to be relearned, mistakes are "rampant", and providers keep changing their back ends.
• SQL injection never went away; he now finds it in GET parameters. ORMs parameterize queries, but teams hand-concatenate SQL when the ORM falls short, for example searching two companies' products after an acquisition. Because the examples always show form posts, Sempf says developers assume query-string parameters can't be injected, when they are easier to inject and less validated. He used to find one or two injections a month and lately one or two a week, all in GET parameters. The only real fix is a parameterized query at the database layer.
• Open source is a trust chain that few people examine. Beyond API keys and connection strings checked into public repos, Sempf points to dependency chains four or five deep, kept up by volunteers without oversight. He calls the XZ Utils backdoor, inserted by a community helper after the maintainer fell behind, a nation-state attack three years in planning that was caught by "blind luck", when someone noticed a timing change in performance testing. Giard counters that closed source also needs trust, but has more eyes on it.
• Use actionable security guidance and fix one thing at a time. Sempf says the OWASP Top 10 is mostly for persuading a CIO to fund security, while the Proactive Controls are its how-to side. He advises picking one control and improving it rather than being overwhelmed. For developers curious about the security world, he recommends a local BSides, of which he says there are 190 worldwide, usually with 300–400 attendees, over the fire hose of DEF CON.

2024-07-08 · open the original ↗

• Windows 11 Notepad now spellchecks and autocorrects by default. Microsoft had offered the feature to beta users since March 2024 and has now pushed it to all Windows 11 users. The host expects pushback from users who want Notepad unbloated and from coders who don't want code autocorrected. Each feature can be turned off separately in settings.

2024-07-08 · open the original ↗

• Graph-grounded chat queries your own meetings, emails and documents. Copilot for Microsoft 365 uses Microsoft Graph to answer questions about items in your organization. Giard says it respects their permissions and won't return anything you don't have access to. It lives at the Copilot link on Microsoft365.com, which goes to Microsoft365.com/chat.
• Built-in prompts handle common tasks such as recapping a meeting. View prompts brings up suggestions. The recap-meeting prompt lists recent meetings, then summarizes key takeaways and actions in separate sections, including who is responsible for each. In the demo it also linked a PowerPoint deck and documents mentioned in the meeting, which Giard had not attended.
• Free-form prompts keep context across follow-ups until New Chat. Giard asked for a summary of emails and Teams chats and channels that mentioned him in the past 14 days, then asked it to go back a week, and again a week, and it understood each follow-up. Clicking New Chat clears the history so a different topic starts fresh.
• Typing a slash lets you pick a specific meeting. Giard used it to choose an upcoming meeting and ask how to prepare for it. He got advice on what the meeting would cover and what to do beforehand.
• Graph supplies facts the prompt leaves out, such as reporting lines. Asked to write an email to "my boss's boss", declining a Tuesday 1 p.m. meeting, offering to watch the recording and asking how to help, Copilot identified the person through Graph without being told. It drafted a professional email drawing on that person's information. Giard advises being as specific as possible about the tone you want.

2024-07-05 · open the original ↗

• Bring the gateway up first, then add devices one at a time. The host says patience makes setup smoother. A UniFi OS gateway comes online either through the UniFi mobile app over Bluetooth or from a wired computer on a LAN port browsing to the IP on its screen, typically 192.168.1.1. The UI account needs multi-factor authentication, which Ubiquiti mandates as of July 2024.
• Add a local-only admin as an emergency backdoor. The host recommends this in case the UniFi cloud login fails. He also advises the Official release channel, scheduled auto-updates for UniFi OS and apps, and leaving the weekly cloud config backup on, or taking manual backups if you disable it.
• Change the default 192.168.1.x subnet if you might VPN sites together. Turn off auto-scale and change the third octet (his example is 192.168.4.1), but leave the /24 mask alone. The DHCP range defaults to .6–.254; widen or narrow it according to how many devices need static IPs.
• The guest checkbox isolates a network from your other subnets automatically. Ticking it creates firewall rules that allow internet access but block your other subnets. On the guest Wi-Fi he points to client device isolation (right for hotel-style networks, wrong where you cast or print), speed-limit profiles (his example is 10 Mbps each way) and a blackout schedule for business hours.
• DNS Shield will likely break the gateway's built-in ad blocking. The ad blocking filters DNS, but gives no visibility into what it blocks. Suspicious activity detection set to Auto is IDS, which only notifies; notify-and-block is IPS. It costs gateway CPU, but the host says home users would probably never notice.

2024-07-05 · open the original ↗

• Client demand for AI moved from strategy, to pilots, to production revenue. Pendse, ThoughtWorks' global director for AI strategy, says clients first asked whether generative AI was a threat or an opportunity. Next they wanted a handful of POCs, which at many companies became hundreds. Then they wanted platforms to standardize data versioning and security, and now they ask how to put these into production and make money from them.
• Easy RAG demos inflate expectations that production can't meet quickly. Dragging PDFs into a web tool yields a chatbot, so executives expect enterprise-wide scale "in another two weeks or two months". Pendse says security staff have to learn AI, and AI staff have to flag risks, to catch AI-specific issues. Those include whether a cloud agreement protects the data, staff uploading data classes that aren't allowed, and tools that by default use prompts to improve the model. A shared platform lets the enterprise make such decisions once instead of in every POC.
• AI makes money by freeing highly paid experts from mundane work. He calls RAG for knowledge access the first, perhaps only, enterprise generative-AI use case with traction. He cites a client team's "search, ask, do" progression: find the source document, then a chatbot, then agents that act. His examples are drug-discovery researchers reading papers and cleaning data, and financial analysts reading thousands of 10-Ks. For a question spanning proteomics, genomics, immunology and radiology, he says a multi-agent system fine-tuned per field could answer faster than five or six human experts.
• Cost, missing baselines and compliance slow adoption. Per-token spending scales unpredictably with demand, though Pendse notes prices are falling as OpenAI cuts costs and competition grows. Many firms can't quantify value because they never measured a baseline, so "the data house" has to be in order first. In financial services, he says the Federal Reserve's SR 11-7 requires traceability of the data used to train a model. LLM vendors won't provide that, so firms must either persuade the auditor or regulator or train their own model at great expense.
• Weak CI/CD practice gets worse once AI is layered on top. Pendse says continuous integration for AI is "one order of magnitude more complex". Teams that keep long-lived branches and rarely merge will see the same chaos spread to model and data versions. He argues fixing those processes is the route to showing traceable value, such as cost savings or new markets.

2024-07-04 · open the original ↗

• .NET Aspire is a bundle, not a framework. Edwards, a principal architect at Microsoft, describes it as templates, NuGet packages, a development-time orchestrator and full adoption of OpenTelemetry, together aimed at building distributed apps; he treats "cloud native" as a term that means different things to different people.
• Good abstractions let you punch through them. He says Web Forms' real sin was making it too hard to escape the abstraction for the 20% case; Aspire's high-level calls sit on ordinary lower layers (adding Postgres just adds a container and injects a connection string as an environment variable), and F12 shows the source.
• Components encode opinions developers would otherwise rediscover. Using Redis as the example, he says an Aspire component picks the client (StackExchange.Redis), registers it in DI with a set lifetime, binds options to configuration, references a community health-check package and wires up OpenTelemetry, all on by default; before Aspire, that client's logging took a raw TextWriter.
• The AppHost describes the whole app in C#. It extends the host-builder pattern to containers, executables, projects and parameters with references between them, and running it starts everything and tears it down; he concedes the top early feedback was that this lifetime is too simple, and that keeping containers running between sessions is a hard problem being worked on.
• Deployment changes are optional. He stresses the orchestration is mainly for development and an existing deployment can stay untouched; alternatively a deployment manifest feeds the Azure Developer CLI, tools Amazon is building, or the community "Aspirate" tool for Kubernetes.

2024-07-02 · open the original ↗

• Enterprise AI demand centres on conversational agents where security is simple. Kotvis, a principal architect in Insight's AI-enabled apps and data group, says organizations want knowledge bases and help desks where role-level security is not in play. He sees enrolling enterprise security into AI, so people don't get information they shouldn't, as the biggest opportunity.
• Every legacy app gets rehosted, refactored or re-envisioned. Kotvis says scarce mainframe talent and the pull of cheaper, independently scalable cloud infrastructure drive modernization, especially in finance and insurance. After sorting an estate into commercial and custom apps, a custom app takes one of three paths. Rehosting is lift-and-shift with adjusted connection strings. Refactoring makes a working app able to use PaaS SQL or a distributed cache. Re-envisioning rebuilds an app that no longer delivers value, starting with UX and visual design. Of 100 apps, he estimates 5–10% are re-envisioned and 10–20% reach end of life.
• Finding people who understand the legacy system is the biggest delay. Old schemas hide "sins", such as columns tripled as first_name_1, first_name_2 and first_name_3, and cryptic mainframe abbreviations. Kotvis says that with full information and available stakeholders, projects would take half or a third of the time.
• Pragmatic 80/20 design with escape hatches beats dogma. Kotvis uses Entity Framework for most work but plans for the 10–20% that needs hand-written SQL, such as common table expressions or recursion, saying "dogma is kind of going to kill any momentum". He applies the same thinking to choosing tools like Apigee, MuleSoft or Logic Apps, and builds modularly so multi-cloud moves or acquisitions don't force a rewrite. He predicts brownfield skill will be highly valuable for the next five to ten years. Giard adds his own experience porting a .NET 1.1 app with help from Michael Feathers' book on legacy code.
• Dev containers and 12-factor principles make environments predictable and portable. Kotvis runs about 50 dev containers on a Linux server in his basement through VS Code, which he compares to GitHub Codespaces. They keep multiple Go or .NET versions apart and end "works on my machine". He uses the 12-factor app principles as guidance and notes that containers move easily between Azure Functions, Container Apps, Container Instances and App Service. Even so, shared files, caches or a socket backplane still need deliberate design.

2024-07-01 · open the original ↗

• A pump can be built for a hundredth of commercial cost. De Bock, an associate professor at the University of Otago and a paediatric endocrinologist, says the low-cost pump programme (LEAP) began in 2018 when a University of Canterbury mechanical engineer refused to proceed unless the device cost 1/100th the price; a national science challenge grant funded both the hardware and qualitative work on how people would view a non-commercial device.
• Pumps are essentially precise syringe drivers. He says the hard part is accurate, robust plunger delivery tested against international accuracy standards; he argues a cheap pump that lasts less long is more forgivable, like a cheap drill, unlike a several-thousand-dollar unit a parent fears a child will break.
• Automation ends the trade between quality and quantity of life. Injections can reach healthy glucose only with a very restrictive life, he says, citing data that people with type 1 make over 100 health decisions a day and describing episodic "diabetes burnout"; he endorses Hanselman's lane-keeping car analogy for the pump-sensor-algorithm loop.
• Technology acts as a health-equity equaliser. His team's cross-sectional study of everyone in New Zealand found CGM use removed the outcome gap predicted by socioeconomic status or ethnicity, including for Māori; he expects Chinese and South Korean entrants (10–14-day sensors) to push CGM prices down to compete with test strips, while much of the global south still gets only syringes and finger pricks.
• Don't build one and wear it yet. He says a study putting the pumps on people was about to be published, open access, but they are untested against everyday wear; his advice is to build one out of interest and pump into something other than yourself, since safety still has to be ironed out.

2024-06-28 · open the original ↗

• Multithreaded Income is personal finance aimed only at technologists. Griffin, independent for 13 years, started it in September 2023 to talk about using tech skills to build several streams of income, prompted by a job market he says has been "deflating" for the past year or two. He aims for weekly episodes but often manages one every two weeks, and had about 40 out at recording.
• A frugal audience is very hard to sell to. His earlier podcast, Two Frugal Dudes, grew somewhat popular but earned perhaps a couple of hundred dollars, enough to pay the accountant, so it was shut down. He took from that the decision to narrow the new show to technologists and software developers.
• His guests fall into a few kinds of income thread. Moonlighters freelancing beside a day job, people who go fully independent after quitting or losing a job, and builders of SaaS or installed products, which usually start by solving their own problem. Some of those businesses have passed the million-dollar mark; one guest's conference stage timer earns about five figures a month with one developer. Others run conferences as businesses, write books or make courses.
• The show covers the business of software, not the tech. Griffin says nobody pays because a product is written in TypeScript or C# or built on Next.js or Laravel; they pay for the problem solved. He wants to cover what developers avoid: pricing, finding first customers, getting feedback and marketing.
• The plan is audience first, paid offerings later. The podcast earns nothing yet. Griffin intends to follow it with coaching, from group "masterminds" with built-in accountability up to one-on-one sessions, and with courses, starting with one on going independent as a consultant. He says he has not built those yet because he does not have an audience to sell to.

2024-06-25 · open the original ↗

• RAG lets an LLM answer with what your organization uniquely knows. Bogue defines retrieval augmented generation as bringing internal content to the model at query time, so answers use the organization's knowledge and language. He calls Copilot a wrapper around the model, which today is ChatGPT's, and says Microsoft could swap or add models without users having to care.
• M365 Copilot already does RAG by sitting on Microsoft Search. Bogue says it turns your prompt into a search query, retrieves results and generates a response from them. Because it goes through search it keeps existing permissions, so content you cannot open in search, such as an executive's salary, never reaches the answer. He found the Microsoft365.com portal chat the best way to use it at the time of recording.
• Better RAG answers come from tuning search. When answers go wrong, Bogue's remedy is search work rather than Copilot work: marking content as authoritative, building information architecture, or tuning search directly where no architecture exists. Connectors such as one for ServiceNow put line-of-business data in the index too. He expects questions like "what did we last sell this customer?" to become possible as small technical gaps close.
• Bogue credits Microsoft's responsible-AI handling, but calls it unfinished. His suicide-prevention research work gets shut down whenever the system does not read the word "suicide" as prevention, which he calls appropriate. He calls the commitment not to train models on a tenant's content or queries "huge", and says bias keeps creeping in however models are trained. His view is that AI will change jobs more than eliminate them, taking work such as Excel cell manipulation and slide design.
• Readiness for Copilot means change, content access and information hygiene. He points to a paper he wrote for AIIM, "Organizational Readiness for Generative Artificial Intelligence", still a draft then, which the host describes as about 30 pages. It covers change management so staff are not afraid, getting priority content into search so Copilot can reach it, and information architecture as hygiene.

2024-06-21 · open the original ↗

• Observability means getting ahead of problems rather than reacting. Crist, a solution architect in Elastic's partner organization, says teams traditionally waited for a "website's down" call, then pulled OS, database and firewall logs and CPU, memory and disk metrics separately and matched them by timestamp, sometimes in a spreadsheet. He defines observability broadly: uptime and performance, the customer's experience on a site, and successful rollouts.
• Logs, metrics and traces belong in one place under a common schema. Crist says Elastic began as search over petabytes of unstructured data; users started ingesting log files into it, and Elastic built tooling around that. Its Elastic Common Schema, which he says Elastic has donated to open source, keys on timestamp plus common fields such as host and IP address, so engineers need not switch tools. He says it also covers Kubernetes pods and containers.
• Traces and machine learning surface anomalies before outages. Traces show latency between services, normally 7–25 ms in his example, jumping to 100 ms or two seconds, and service maps show which service eats the most of a five-second response. Crist says Elastic ships "three or 400" machine learning jobs for anomaly detection, and correlation analysis finds which fields differ when a log rate goes from 100 to 10,000 entries a minute. Security examples include logins at 2 AM from users who log in 8 AM–6 PM, and data leaving for an unusual country.
• Elastic's AI assistant applies RAG to logs, knowledge base and business data. Crist describes asking in plain language whether an error matters or to summarize today's alerts, with the answer built from the customer's logs, metrics and traces through a model such as Azure OpenAI. Resolved problems go into a knowledge base for the next engineer. Customers adding revenue data and service-level objectives can ask the revenue impact of an outage, in his example $5,000 a minute; automated responses to alerts are what he sees as the future.
• Synthetic monitoring adds the user's view to the service's view. Crist says the roadmap includes scripted jobs that simulate a user, such as a Chrome browser in Japan searching a product and checking price and inventory, run every five minutes or hourly. He says this matters most for multinationals running thousands of pods worldwide. He also notes Elastic is API-driven, has a basic open-source version, and integrates with case tools such as ServiceNow.

2024-06-20 · open the original ↗

• Older developers should mentor with "yes, and", not stop energy. Hanselman, now Microsoft's VP of developer community, says his identity is teacher, not company, and his goal is making early-career people succeed, including 40-something career switchers. Elders offer kind, patient mentorship and historical context, and should answer a junior's idea with "here's what we learned when we tried" rather than "we did that before".
• Information is easier to get, but getting noticed is harder. Hanselman stands by his "dark matter developers" post: for every social-media star there are a thousand people doing good work, and being noticed may not matter. Social media is "algorithmically designed to make us feel bad", so the only comparison worth making is against yourself yesterday.
• Don't make juniors earn the high level by learning everything below. Hanselman compares insisting on assembler and dump debugging to making his 16-year-old learn stick shift when 3–4% of American cars have one. His standing advice is to go one level below your comfort zone (V8 for JavaScript, the CLR for .NET), and he tells a story of a Black Girls Code student who debugged his "broken toaster" by asking whether the neighbours had power.
• Hire for curiosity, not for the language someone already knows. Hanselman relays Scott Hunter's line about hiring a basketball team for height, meaning intellectual height, and cites a Microsoft ASP.NET engineer who was a Python person before joining. The hosts agree programmers are different "species", and good leaders fit each to the work they love.
• Feedback thrown as a rock goes unread. Revisiting a 2015 panel where he called a comment "either elitist or mean", Hanselman says the critic was 75% right but the delivery buried it. His Build message: Microsoft is 300,000 people and "not organized enough to be as evil" as accused, its engineers are findable, so vote with your feet and engage them with empathy.

2024-06-18 · open the original ↗

• AI services are pulling a late-moving public sector into the cloud. Martensson, an Azure consultant who runs his own company, says government lags because of decades of legacy IT and some of the most sensitive data there is, such as citizens' patient records, governed by codes and EU rules. Because the large AI services run on Azure, using them on that data means moving it to the cloud, possibly petabytes of it.
• His region is already migrating, ahead of its peers. He works for Region Skåne, which he calls Sweden's third-largest region, with a large centralized IT department; Azure's data centers in Sweden "make the conversation smoother". Its Azure subscriptions went from about 40, few in use and not set up uniformly, to over 100 and rising, and he says local Microsoft representatives tell them other regions and communes are mostly behind. He knows of no separate government cloud in Europe like Azure's in the US, so the region uses public cloud as is, starting with things like its public website, classed as critical infrastructure because it informs citizens in a crisis and so must stay available.
• The public body must own cloud governance, not its suppliers. Martensson says the region needs its own core team, which he sits on, deciding "what goes" and telling its long-standing server and operations partners. That competence does not exist in-house in the public sector, so it must be trained or hired; he calls the work honourable because "this is my tax money at work".
• Meet the regulation, not the legacy system built for it. When told everything must go through an old central control system, he asks for the actual requirement, since no law mandates that system, only governance. He refuses to "weigh the cloud down" by reproducing it in Azure and uses the platform's built-in auditing and other services instead.
• AI may replace one of two doctors reading pathology images. In a current project, Martensson says, pathology photographs that traditionally need two doctors to check for tumours are reviewed by AI, which flags regions of interest, plus one doctor. The two-doctor and AI-plus-doctor results are being compared to see if they are "within reason"; his case is that the AI does not tire and scales, saving doctors' time.

2024-06-14 · open the original ↗

• Open-source big data descends from Google's published papers. Brust, a journalist and analyst who was once a developer, says Google published papers on MapReduce and the Google File System, and a Yahoo team built an open-source implementation that became Hadoop and then the company Hortonworks. Hortonworks later merged with Cloudera, which kept the name though, he says, mostly Hortonworks' technology survived; Brust discloses Cloudera is his client. He says Hadoop has since given way to Spark.
• Microsoft arrived late because big data meant Linux and Java. Brust says Microsoft entered by partnering with Hortonworks to port Hadoop to Windows, then ported its own distribution back to Linux, followed by its HDInsight cloud service; around 2010 the world was not Microsoft-friendly. The cloud lowered the entry cost of a rack of commodity servers and abstracted away the Linux setup that Windows and Visual Studio developers would not have done. He calls Amazon's Redshift arguably the first cloud data warehouse, and notes Google's BigQuery.
• Fabric is real integration, not a rebranding. The industry's problem now, Brust argues, is fragmentation: even Microsoft customers had to stitch together Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Data Factory, Event Hubs and Blob or Data Lake Storage. Fabric unifies them technologically and economically, as SaaS paid for as one pool of compute; it is Spark-based for data engineering and data science, SQL Server-based elsewhere, and includes KQL databases from Kusto. He traces the lineage from SQL Server's OLAP Services, acquired with Israel's Panorama, to Amir Netz, now a technical fellow and "mastermind" behind Fabric. Brust is a 20-year Microsoft MVP and was in Fabric's early adopter program.
• Rivals are extending products rather than unifying platforms. Brust says Google is adding capabilities to BigQuery, and Snowflake is pitching its warehouse as a data platform, but he does not think that equals putting an abstraction over "seven or eight specialized platforms". He grants that the Cloudera Data Platform is also a platform. In his view the 2010–2012 rush of invention was the "scatter" phase and the industry is now in the "gather".
• AI's role in data will be assistive, starting with governance. Brust says the data world does not yet know what to do with AI for its mainline work. He hopes for easier generative AI and machine learning, sees AI populating data catalogs and drafting governance policy as a starting point for data stewards to correct, and says self-healing ETL pipelines that adapt to schema changes are "science fiction-y" but starting to happen.

2024-06-13 · open the original ↗

• XPF runs unmodified WPF apps cross-platform by swapping WPF's renderer. James says Avalonia forked WPF in December 2021 and replaced milcore, the unmanaged DirectX 9 compositor, with Avalonia's renderer, leaving PresentationCore and PresentationFramework largely untouched. Apps and third-party control suites like Telerik, Syncfusion and DevExpress still believe they run on WPF; Hanselman calls it "a wildly successful lie".
• A pure-WPF port takes seconds; native dependencies are the real work. Per James, porting means changing the csproj's project SDK to XPF and adding a license property. Hanselman's Baby Smash, with 106 lines of XAML but calls into winmm, user32 and speech synthesis, ran on James's Mac after about five minutes of commenting out the speech synthesizer.
• Avalonia draws every pixel itself and needs little from the OS. The only native control is the window. Rendering sits on Skia, with DirectX pluggable, and embedded devices like Schneider Electric's HMIs get pixels pushed straight to the Linux framebuffer. James says this makes supporting many Linux flavours easier, including a sale to a Chinese conglomerate on a Chinese distro on Arm hardware, though text rendering is the hardest part.
• Total code reuse across devices means "you must hate your users." James separates cross-platform from cross-paradigm: modal dialogs, async browser dialogs and single-view apps all change by device. WebAssembly and iOS/Android are internal previews. Hanselman suggests 70–80% reuse is good; James thinks good architecture gets higher, and calls Apple's Catalyst ports on the Mac subpar.
• Paid XPF exists to fund open-source Avalonia. James says Avalonia is about nine full-time people, bootstrapped rather than VC-backed, and earned its revenue from support and porting services. XPF targets a single-digit share of WPF apps as a stepping stone, so a free XPF is not possible; he offers a Hanselminutes landing page with a 30-day trial.

2024-06-13 · open the original ↗

• Every UniFi network needs four components, often combined in one box. They are a gateway (router/firewall), wireless access points, switches and the UniFi Network controller; the Dream Machine Pro combines gateway, switch and controller without Wi-Fi, while UniFi Express combines gateway, Wi-Fi and controller with a single LAN port. The host recommends beginners run the controller on the gateway, so it is always on and new devices find it easily.
• Beginners should pick a gateway with a switch, not built-in Wi-Fi. The host prefers the Cloud Gateway Ultra to UniFi Express: the Ultra costs $129 and has a four-port switch; Express costs $149 with a Wi-Fi 6 radio, but supports fewer devices (up to 30 UniFi devices) and its small antenna covers about an apartment or small home. The Ultra lets you place stronger access points where coverage is best. Most gateways handle up to 1 Gbps; above that, check each product page's throughput with IDS/IPS enabled.
• A small PoE switch covers most home wiring. His pick is the 8-port, AC-powered Switch Ultra 60 W costs $159 and can power two or three PoE devices; the $199 Lite 16 PoE (8 of 16 ports PoE) is the step up, and he runs one in his garage. He also likes the $29 Flex Mini, powered by USB-C or PoE, for wiring devices behind a TV.
• Beginners should skip Wi-Fi 7 and buy Wi-Fi 6 access points. Wi-Fi 7 costs more and few clients can use it, though he expects that to change in four or five years. Of the PoE models under $150 he rates the $129 U6 Plus best, about double the U6 Lite's throughput for $30 more; the U6 Pro at $159 is fine too, and he suggests a U6 Mesh outdoors.
• With access points, less is more. He advises starting with one or two centrally placed access points in a typical wood-and-drywall home and adding more only where coverage proves lacking; without PoE switches, each needs a PoE injector. He built the UI Product Selector site he uses here to filter and share builds, and the video opens and closes with a pitch for Rogue Support's network design service.

2024-06-11 · open the original ↗

• An administrator builds five pieces before anyone gets a workstation. In the Azure portal under Microsoft Dev Box, Giard creates a Dev Center (about 12 minutes this time, 10–15 before), then a project inside it (under five minutes), a Dev Box definition, a Dev Box pool, and finally access control on the project. The project's optional Dev Box limits cap how many developers can use it at once, for cost or practical reasons; he leaves it off, and says tags only add name-value pairs for sorting and filtering reports.
• The definition fixes the image and hardware, and hardware sets the price. Created under Dev Box Configuration in the Dev Center, it takes an image (he picks Visual Studio 2022 on Windows 11 Enterprise) pinned to a version or to "latest". More CPUs and RAM cost more per running hour; he takes the cheapest, 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM, with 256 GB of SSD storage, and turns on hibernation to save money after inactivity. Custom image templates are deferred to another video.
• The pool ties a definition to a network and a shutdown schedule. Created under the project's Manage section, it uses a Microsoft-hosted network by default, which Giard says usually makes sense, with your own network as an option for specific configuration. He enables auto-stop at 7:00 p.m. US Central as a cost-saving measure, leaves single sign-on off, and must confirm he holds the licences for the Windows and Visual Studio software; creation took about seven minutes.
• Two roles on the project's Access Control (IAM) tab grant access. DevCenter Dev Box User lets someone create dev boxes from the definition; DevCenter Project Admin suits someone taking over administration, for example while you are on vacation. Assigning a role to a user took about a second.
• Users create boxes at devbox.microsoft.com and connect by browser or RDP. The portal warns creation averages 25 minutes and can take up to 65, with an email when ready; his took about half an hour and arrived with Visual Studio and PowerShell installed. The browser needs nothing extra, but without single sign-on it asks for a password; Giard recommends the RDP desktop client where you have it, keeping the browser for a borrowed machine.

2024-06-11 · open the original ↗

• Responsible AI has moved from principles to operational practice. Sandford, Microsoft's Developer Engagement Lead in Asia, says this year's talks are about operationalizing responsible generative AI. She advises a pinch of salt with influencers' claims: by the time a trick is shown it is usually blocked, and one TikTok clip she checked presented as a Microsoft release a deepfake project that was only research, used generated rather than real faces and was not even in preview.
• Protection works as defence in depth across four levels. Sandford lists the foundation model's training, then system or "meta" prompts that set purpose and rules (no harm, no offensive content, no copying others' material), then content filters, then the user experience layer. She describes jailbreaking as getting a model to reveal or work around its hidden rules, often through a "fictional story" without constraints, and says it used to be possible before GPT-3.5, when there was no system prompt.
• Content filters are adjustable because some uses need sensitive topics. Sandford says jailbreak and safety filters are sliders that can all be turned on, which suits a front-end customer-service bot. A health application's patients may need to discuss sexual or violent content, so there the filters stay off and the conversation is controlled through more detailed system prompts.
• Grounding settings and red-teaming limit hallucination. She says OpenAI's scale runs from zero, fully grounded and answering "I don't know", to four, while Azure OpenAI stops at two, enough in Microsoft's view for an imaginative story. A company bot grounded in its data can be set to zero and told in the prompt not to make answers up; temperature controls how far repeat answers diverge. The final level is red teams trying to break the bot, with improvement that never ends.
• Humans stay accountable for what their AI agents say. Sandford cites an airline whose chatbot told a bereaved customer he could claim a funeral discount within 90 days after buying; the airline argued in court the bot was its own legal entity, and she says the judge held it responsible for all its agents, AI or human. She adds that transparency means telling users they are talking to a bot and handing off to a human where needed, and uses a bank manager openly lending only to straight white men aged 30–40 to show something can be transparent without being fair.

2024-06-07 · open the original ↗

• Aspire's build output is a JSON manifest that deployment tools consume. Fritz describes .NET Aspire as a stack, not a framework, for observability, resiliency, scalability and manageability. AZD (the Azure Developer CLI) is the first-class tool for Azure. A community tool, Aspir8, generates Kubernetes YAML from the same manifest, and other tools target AWS, but Azure-only services such as Cosmos DB cannot go to a non-Azure cluster.
• azd init then azd up builds, provisions and deploys. azd up asks for region, subscription and resource group, generates unique names for background resources such as the container registry and key vault, and names services as the app host does, so a service called "web" becomes a container app called "web". Fritz says a Redis cache deploys by default as a container in Azure Container Apps. Extra app-host configuration switches it to the Azure Redis service or to a supplied connection string.
• AZD generates most of the CI/CD pipeline for you. azd init writes a next-steps.md pointing to GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps scripts. Fritz prefers GitHub Actions, and says azd pipeline config prompts for parameters and creates the pipeline secrets so every commit builds and deploys.
• The hidden Bicep can be written to disk and edited. Fritz did this on Aspirify.net, a .NET Aspire news hub he builds with Aspire on his live streams, to give the container app its custom domain and certificates. That was during the previews, when templates were rough and one preview-to-preview change broke his deployment completely. He says it now deploys properly and the customization is documented.
• Some deployment defaults need explicit overriding. Azure storage defaults to geo-redundant storage, and Fritz says the cheaper locally redundant option has to be set in the app host's Program.cs. Ingress must be turned on explicitly for a site to take external HTTP traffic, which caught him out after Azure App Service, while internal APIs such as his thumbnail service stay unexposed.

2024-06-07 · open the original ↗

• Aspire turns on cloud-native features .NET already had. Hunter, who runs Microsoft's Azure Developer Experience team after 15 years on .NET, calls Aspire Microsoft's first "opinion" of what a cloud-native .NET app looks like, inspired partly by Java's Spring. It switches on by default the HTTP client resiliency using Polly and Entity Framework Core retries added around ASP.NET Core 3.0, health checks for orchestrators like Kubernetes, and OpenTelemetry. Those defaults sit in a service defaults project the developer owns and can edit, which he presents as his answer to the "magic" he found hard to debug in Spring Boot and ASP.NET Web Forms.
• The app host runs multi-project apps in a set order everywhere. Hunter says Visual Studio's multiple startup projects were "klutzy" and VS Code had no equivalent. The app host's AddProject with WithReference defines what starts and in what order from the command line, VS Code or Visual Studio, and WithExternalHttpEndpoints marks which projects are visible on the public internet when published; an API called only by the Blazor front end stays private.
• Service discovery ends hard-coded localhost ports. Instead of copying a random port from another project's launchSettings.json, Hunter says, the front end calls the API by its app host name, such as http://api, and the orchestrator injects the real address through environment variables. He says the same app then runs on his machine, Azure or AWS without changes.
• Dependencies run in Docker locally and become Azure resources on publish. Hunter says packages for Redis, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL and Azure Storage start containers through Docker Desktop, so nothing is installed locally. Publishing creates the proper Azure resource, such as Azure SQL Database, wires connection strings through environment variables, and uses managed identity or Key Vault where it can.
• azd publishes the whole app without a Dockerfile. Hunter says azd init and azd up create an Azure Container Apps environment with one container per project; azd infra synth writes out the Bicep for ops teams, and azd pipeline sets up CI/CD. The dashboard also runs in Azure but keeps data in memory for hours, not days; Application Insights stores history. He says 1.0 shipped at Build in May, numbered 8.0 because it ships with .NET 8, and expects 2.0 at .NET Conf in November with .NET 9.

2024-06-06 · open the original ↗

• Separate accessible voting machines are "separate but equal" and fail. Gilbert says the 2002 Help America Vote Act's rule of at least one accessible machine per precinct got it wrong. His Prime III is one machine anyone can vote on, whether or not they can see, hear or read or have arms. Audio prompts let a voter say "vote" or blow into the microphone instead of naming a candidate, which keeps the ballot private.
• Nobody knows how AI will reshape work until it is deployed. Gilbert calls AI's effect on jobs "to be determined": visions get implemented, fail and are abandoned. His example is police facial recognition, which looked good until deployment showed it misidentified some demographics more than others. Hanselman contrasts smooth airport face recognition in Korea with a letter from 14 US senators opposing it.
• Admissions and hiring fights are about capacity, not race. Gilbert built Applications Quest in response to the Supreme Court's affirmative-action rulings (June 2003 and "last year"). When qualified applicants outnumber slots, someone qualified is turned away and looks for a scapegoat, so he predicts the fight will move to legacies and athletes. AQ works on application data after humans have read it and recommends a qualified, "holistically diverse" shortlist.
• A pre-approach video call could de-escalate traffic stops. His lab's Virtual Traffic Stop app, prompted by students upset at shootings during routine stops, connects driver and officer by video before the officer approaches. A third party such as a parent can join, hard-of-hearing drivers can chat instead, and the recording goes to both sides. Gilbert pitches it on officer safety and predicts it will be built into every car; only the University of Florida police use it so far.
• The lab ships working systems rather than only papers. Gilbert says this is deliberate under its "change the world" motto, and that ideas come from events affecting students and their communities. In 2015 it held what he calls the world's first brain-drone race, to show non-invasive brain-computer interfaces are viable, and a dissertation there studied BCIs people would want to wear.

2024-06-06 · open the original ↗

• The Pro Max adds power, capacity and a spectrum-analysis radio. The U7 Pro Max keeps the U7 Pro's form factor and 2.5 GbE port, adds transmit power for coverage, moves to 4x4 MIMO on 5 GHz for more clients, and adds a radio dedicated to real-time spectral analysis. The host has installed one in his attic and worries about heat; both models have fans and are rated to 140°F (60°C).
• The spectrum view shows live and recent channel use per band. On UniFi Network 8.2.93, the U7 Pro Max adds a Spectrum tab covering 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz, with a live waveform plus a waterfall of the past 60 seconds; other access points show only point-in-time SSID, channel and signal. Green means little activity, and yellow or red marks busy spectrum to avoid.
• His own scan showed which channels his neighbours crowd. On 2.4 GHz the waterfall showed heavy use of channels 1 and 11, leaving 6 clearest; on 5 GHz channel 157 was busy and the rest mostly clear; 6 GHz was empty, which he attributes to likely being the only Wi-Fi 7 user in his neighbourhood.
• For now the data only helps you set channels by hand. The host found no sign that the spectral analysis feeds automatic channel selection. Ubiquiti's launch video promises continuous packet capture in a future version, which he says remains to be seen.

2024-06-05 · open the original ↗

• One of AliExpress's cheapest point-to-point bridges comes complete. The host's two-pack cost just under $35 shipped and came with two PoE injectors, Ethernet cables and tie straps; the box claims IP65 weatherproofing, 1–5 km range, 300 Mbps and 2.4/5.8 GHz. Each unit has a master/slave switch, WAN/PoE and LAN ports, and a reset button for one-key pairing.
• Setup took one button press and an IP change. The units appeared to pair on their own at power-up, with full signal bars. Both share a default LAN IP of 192.168.188.253 and the password "admin", so he gave each a static address on his own network; the interface reported confusing addresses, but traffic passed and the internet was reachable.
• Measured throughput was about a third of the box's claim. He got roughly 80 Mbps each way: Speedtest.net gave about 60 down and 43 up; a LAN test to a 10 GbE Mac Mini gave 76/82 with antennas at the ceiling, and 81.7/72.3 when aimed at each other 3–4 feet apart. He explains vendors' 300 Mbps usually sums both directions, so he expected about 150 Mbps at most.
• He judges them good enough for outbuildings, with durability untested. For a barn, gazebo or remote garage running a few cameras or an access point, he says the price is hard to beat. How they hold up over time is unknown; he would trust the IP65 rating mainly under an eave. The video carries a pitch for Rogue Support's bridge design service.

2024-06-05 · open the original ↗

• .NET Aspire builds telemetry, health checks and resiliency into distributed apps by default. Giard calls it an opinionated tech stack for distributed cloud applications. It had just reached general release at Microsoft Build in late May 2024. It needs the latest Visual Studio 2022 tooling and a running Docker Desktop, because Aspire runs some services, such as the Redis cache, in local containers. The ".NET Aspire Starter Application" template creates a web front end that calls an API service. It offers HTTPS, Redis caching and a test project as options, and adds two Aspire projects: AppHost and ServiceDefaults.
• The AppHost project wires up and starts every service. Its Program.cs uses a distributed application builder rather than a web application builder. AddRedis registers a cache named "cache", and that name is how the connection string is looked up later, so it can sit in configuration and change between environments instead of living in code. AddProject registers the API service and the web front end by name. WithExternalHttpEndpoints exposes the front end to the public internet, and WithReference links the front end to the cache and the API and starts them. Giard says this saves setting multiple startup projects in Visual Studio, a setting that isn't checked into source control, so people pulling the code skip a step.
• ServiceDefaults adds OpenTelemetry, health checks, service discovery and retry logic in one call. AddServiceDefaults is an extension method on the host application builder, and the web and API projects each call it at startup; the web project also adds the Redis output cache by its "cache" name. The code can be modified or stepped through, and it ships with commented-out suggestions for changes. Giard's point is that Microsoft provided these features long ago but left developers to add them, whereas Aspire adds them automatically.
• Running AppHost opens a dashboard showing the app's current health. The dashboard lists endpoints and shows console output, structured logs, traces with call timing and parallelism, and per-resource metrics such as active requests over time. The sample front end has a counter that keeps its state in the cache and a weather page that calls the API. Giard stresses this is a quick snapshot, not a substitute for Application Insights. Long-term logging and analysis still need setting up in Azure Monitor.
• Giard recommends copying the template's patterns rather than retrofitting an existing app. Right-clicking an existing web project offers "Add .NET Aspire Orchestrator Support", which creates the AppHost and ServiceDefaults projects. He advises stepping through the starter template to understand it first, then building your own project the same way.

2024-06-05 · open the original ↗

• SOA failed partly through the shared "master document". Lhotka, who does cloud modernization consulting at Xebia, says many SOA efforts 12 to 14 years ago defined one master customer document to pass from service to service, an idea he says large consulting firms pushed because they could sell tooling around it. In microservices as he thinks SOA should have been, each service defines its own input and output contract.
• Brownfield modernization starts with cataloguing what you actually run. Lhotka says clients have found forgotten VB6 apps used once a quarter or once a year that the business cannot run without, and one had no source code because the departed developer's PC had been recycled. The catalogue ranks each asset by business value and technical debt, then decides whether to buy a SaaS replacement, lift and shift it into a cloud VM, which he says gains little since you still patch the OS, or rewrite it.
• Cloud-native means following the 12 factors at 12factor.net. Lhotka calls them behavioural patterns, covering startup, shutdown, configuration, memory and source management, and says modern .NET absorbed many, such as a new configuration system. Greenfield apps should aim for all 12; for existing apps a former colleague's "fast five" makes them "cloud capable". The one he recalls is externalized configuration from environment variables or a store such as Key Vault, not an app.config.
• Business logic buried in the UI makes modernization hard. Lhotka says tooling from VB to Blazor makes it easiest to put code in button-click events, which cannot be tested without the form and must be teased out to move to services; his open-source framework CSLA exists to give business logic its own layer. He advises extracting only the parts that change often, such as regulatory or pricing logic, while 90% stays in the monolith, and treating every app as mission-critical because two-year stopgaps run for 20.
• Migrations need a business driver or a technology driver. On the business side Lhotka looks for real pain such as scale or competitors, while admitting some projects start because a CTO was sold Kubernetes; lift and shift can be a first step to gain Azure's fault tolerance. On the technology side he cites FoxPro apps rewritten when the platform faded and argues .NET Framework, maintained but not innovated, needs a multi-year strategy to modern .NET before developers willing to work on it become scarce and expensive.